The amazingly unlikely true story of how a grumpy old man and lifelong bachelor won the love of a beautiful young woman and started a family – and all by writing a curmudgeonly blog about his lonely journey to the grave.

Now who would have predicted that?

Wednesday, 13 February 2008

A perfect day for it

For the last two years I’ve written supposedly humorous newspaper columns for Valentine’s Day, mentioning in passing that I shall be spending it alone. Each has produced some response, even though I didn’t provide anything as helpful as an e-mail address, so the ladies concerned had to go to all the trouble of Googling me to track me down. This year I did get the paper to print an address and – so far – absolutely nothing. Which just goes to show the wisdom of that old advice about playing a bit hard to get. And maybe not making it clear that you are absolutely desperate. Now with the added disincentive that I may well choose to write about the resulting disaster on this blog (though, to look on the positive side from the point of view of a shy female, there is virtually no evidence that anyone reads it).

It would be another perfect day for a long walk, being warm and sunny without the slightest breath of wind. But, instead, I decide to spend it out in the garden hacking back overgrown trees and shrubs, of which I seem to have an inordinate number given the modest dimensions of the plot on which my house stands. When I bought it, I worked in London all week and the last thing I wanted was to spend every summer weekend trying to keep a large garden in some sort of order. Now I’ve got much more time on my hands but no greater inclination to get them dirty and / or torn to ribbons. The dog is pretty cheesed off, too. No, give me a bracing walk in the hills or a bottle of something chilled and an amusing female companion any day. Any day at all. But preferably tomorrow, God, if you're listening.

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About Me

Keith Hann is a serial quitter: professionally as a historian (the last days of the British Empire), then an investment analyst (the last days of the British food industry) and finally as a financial public relations consultant (the last days of pretty much any company that was deluded enough to hire him). In each case he packed it in just when there might have been some chance of making a few quid out of it. Then there is his personal life score: engagements 4, marriages 1. For the last few years Keith has been indulging himself as a hobby journalist. It seems unlikely that he will ever make a living out of this. And if he ever shows signs of making it Big, his resignation will be going straight into the post. In November 2007 Keith started blogging (a) to take the mickey out of the genre, (b) because a misguided friend told him that it was the ideal way to secure his Big Break as a writer, and (c) to chronicle the final days of a dying breed of solitary English curmudgeon. Nothing remarkable about any of that, except that it somehow convinced a beautiful, funny young woman that she had finally met the man of her dreams. As we always say Up North, there’s nowt so queer as folk.